Cucumber Salad In Many Tongues

When most people see a Kirby cucumber they pickle it, but the bulk of cukes my family buys and consumes from New York City farmers markets are Persian. Lani’s Farm is our go-to: selling long, crisp cooling cukes that we turn into snack sticks, batons for maki rolls, and add in the round as a crunch factor to ordinary cheese sandwiches. We also love them in nice, bright, lightly vinegared salads.

Cucumber are a fresh start, a building block as it were. In Japan, sunomono (which  translates simply to “vinegar dishes”) is a category of cold salads that you see on the side of a plain bowl of warm sushi rice. The cucumbers are cut paper thin, salted, sit, then drained before being tossed in a tangy dressing of rice vinegar, sugar and soy sauce. In the Philippines, ensaladang pipino introduces ginger and fish sauce into the mix, a nice bright complement alongside fried dishes, similar to how American barbecues serve paper trays of sweet-and-sour pickles to cut through all the smoke and fat of the massive cuts of meat. Whereas in Germany, gurkensalat is the European standard — quick-pickled cucumber slices are perked up by sugar and vinegar, and bound by sour cream and dill.

At around 95% water content, cucumbers often need a little something to make them pop, and draw out their sweet melon-y taste. Logan Moffitt, aka TikTok’s “Cucumber Guy”, whose cucumber “salad” recipe went viral a couple summers ago added a few good glugs of sesame oil, soy sauce and fish sauce, but, for me, the only thing that was missing was acid. Moffitt wasn’t the first one to have a cucumber salad recipe go viral, in fact, two of the New York Times top rated recipes are cucumber salads. Martha Rose Shulman’s 2017 Cucumber Salad With Soy, Ginger and Garlic, is very similar to Moffitt’s formula, but with 3 tablespoons of seasoned rice vinegar it adds that tanginess I so craved. Ali Slagle’s 2024 Cucumber Salad is quite simple and straightforward, similar to sunomono — some salt, sugar and 3 tablespoons of vinegar (red or white wine, rice or Sherry) tossed with thinly sliced red onion, a flurry of dill and crack of black pepper, are crunchy and herbaceous. Add some sour cream to it and it’s Polish mizeria! Or grated with garlic and yogurt it’s Greek tzatziki.

While there are many ways to pickle a cucumber, and immeasurable inspirations worldwide (e.g. Taiwanese smashed and spiced with chilies) we want to know: what’s your viral vinegary cucumber salad recipe?